Michael Laird and Carina Gosselé: Project proposal for
Kurt Schwitters in England – Authenticity, Reproduction, Simulation
In the fall of 2006, Carina Gosselé and Michael Laird were invited to participate in Extra (sic) Factor, an exhibition in Antwerp marking the demise of Factor 44 – a legendary alternative art space – held in the then soon-to-be-demolished harbor warehouse where the original Extra City exhibition space was located.
Seeing as there was an air of closure and destruction to this exhibition, our original plan was to create a blueprint on the warehouse floor of an ideal series of spaces concerned with memory and desire. Our focus, however, quickly shifted from what this imaginary space was intended for, to playing around with the space itself. To this end, we “borrowed” Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren’s 1923 axonometric drawing of a plan for a house, pulled it apart and reassembled it along lines somewhere between Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau constructions and El Lissitzky’s PROUN series. Shifting the pieces of van Doesburg and van Eesteren’s plan, we created a template and projected it in sections on five walls (approximately 4.5 meters at the highest point) and a section of floor in the Extra City warehouse, which we proceeded to cover with lines of black Tesa-4651 tape. This template was supplemented with architectural elements more or less made up on the spot, based on an illusionistic method of representing architectural space more familiar to us as visual artists than the axonometric strategy employed by van Doesburg and van Eesteren in their architectural rendering. Although these artists knew each other and at times collaborated on projects, by overlapping their high-modernist tactics – utopia as suggested by De Stijl artists such as van Doesburg, Lissitzky’s Suprematist experiments with form and Schwitters’ Dada assemblage strategies – we created a work that was simultaneously clear and confusing, logical and impossible, where axonometric and illusionistic architectural spaces collide, interact, intersect, contradict and ignore each other, their simultaneous appearance deforming sequential movement through space.
This site-specific installation in the guise of a drawing (or drawing in the guise of an installation) was dubbed “Factoid,” subsequent versions of which were created for projects in Düsseldorf, Brussels and Ljubljana. For each location we worked in, recycled elements from the “original” project were expanded upon and reassembled to fit the areas covered (specific details about each version of Factoid are in the appendix).
For Kurt Schwitters in England – Authenticity, Reproduction, Simulation, we propose to create a fifth version of Factoid and for Michael Laird to give an artist’s talk about the history of, and ideas behind, this project. In keeping with the theme of this conference and exhibition, the emphasis (or point of departure) would be on our appropriation and manipulation of modern art and architectural plans, as described above.
Michael Laird
Kurt Schwitters in England – Authenticity, Reproduction, Simulation
In the fall of 2006, Carina Gosselé and Michael Laird were invited to participate in Extra (sic) Factor, an exhibition in Antwerp marking the demise of Factor 44 – a legendary alternative art space – held in the then soon-to-be-demolished harbor warehouse where the original Extra City exhibition space was located.
Seeing as there was an air of closure and destruction to this exhibition, our original plan was to create a blueprint on the warehouse floor of an ideal series of spaces concerned with memory and desire. Our focus, however, quickly shifted from what this imaginary space was intended for, to playing around with the space itself. To this end, we “borrowed” Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren’s 1923 axonometric drawing of a plan for a house, pulled it apart and reassembled it along lines somewhere between Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau constructions and El Lissitzky’s PROUN series. Shifting the pieces of van Doesburg and van Eesteren’s plan, we created a template and projected it in sections on five walls (approximately 4.5 meters at the highest point) and a section of floor in the Extra City warehouse, which we proceeded to cover with lines of black Tesa-4651 tape. This template was supplemented with architectural elements more or less made up on the spot, based on an illusionistic method of representing architectural space more familiar to us as visual artists than the axonometric strategy employed by van Doesburg and van Eesteren in their architectural rendering. Although these artists knew each other and at times collaborated on projects, by overlapping their high-modernist tactics – utopia as suggested by De Stijl artists such as van Doesburg, Lissitzky’s Suprematist experiments with form and Schwitters’ Dada assemblage strategies – we created a work that was simultaneously clear and confusing, logical and impossible, where axonometric and illusionistic architectural spaces collide, interact, intersect, contradict and ignore each other, their simultaneous appearance deforming sequential movement through space.
This site-specific installation in the guise of a drawing (or drawing in the guise of an installation) was dubbed “Factoid,” subsequent versions of which were created for projects in Düsseldorf, Brussels and Ljubljana. For each location we worked in, recycled elements from the “original” project were expanded upon and reassembled to fit the areas covered (specific details about each version of Factoid are in the appendix).
For Kurt Schwitters in England – Authenticity, Reproduction, Simulation, we propose to create a fifth version of Factoid and for Michael Laird to give an artist’s talk about the history of, and ideas behind, this project. In keeping with the theme of this conference and exhibition, the emphasis (or point of departure) would be on our appropriation and manipulation of modern art and architectural plans, as described above.
Michael Laird